


nothing can ever be held

by eudaimon



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:10:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things that only Captains know - Pike doesn't always know how to put them into words, but he hopes that Jim gets it, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nothing can ever be held

_We fought all night and then we danced  
In your kitchen  
You were as much in my hands  
As water or darkness or nothing  
Can ever be held _

The rain starts in for certain about a mile from the house and Tango dances and scuffs her shoes against the dirt and he lays one hand against her neck and he tips his face up towards the darkening sky. He's lived in the desert his whole life, known when to fear it, when to love it. The water splashes in fat, warm drops on his face and he thinks about the things that he never thought he'd have again: the smell of sage that the wind brings off the flat, warm land behind the house…the warm pulse of his horse's heart against the palm of his hand….the hard summer rain over the desert.

Riding with his knees (and Tango knows the way anyway; it was a year before he could walk again, and eighteen months before he could get on his horse, and now they make this ride every day), Christopher Pike spreads out his arms and rides homeward with his head still tipped back and the water splashing against his forehead and the bridge of his nose and running down inside his collar. There is a kind of grace rarely given by God and Chris has only ever been on the barest of speaking terms with the Lord, but his Mother was a believer. She used to pick desert flowers and put them in a silver vase in the middle of the kitchen table, and she was the one who taught him to ride, and she was the one who sung to him, and the one that believed in him: if he wanted to go faster than light then, one day, he would.

And every time he went away, she lit a candle in the window and she waited for him to come home. He keeps those candles in a drawer in the kitchen and, once a year, without fail, he lights one, but it's never for him anymore.

Delphine Pike's been dead for a long, long time.

_Listen: if you read enough about a thing, it starts to feel like you were there for it, in the first place. Twelve minutes, eight-hundred lives. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, snapping awake, it feels like you were one of them, but you weren't. You were twenty years old, still in San Francisco, and the Kelvin was too far out to even make a spark in the blue, blue sky. You still feel like you were there to see it happen, though._

Still, he lights a candle, places a call to a rented apartment in San Francisco, but the occupant is not at home. This year, the candle's white and he leaves it burning in the kitchen window and then he goes and takes a shower so long and so hot that the pipes creak and tremble and he leaves the window open so that he can smell the rain-wet warmth of the desert sage.

There's a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, left over from his promotion, un-drunk during the months of rehab...There's vodka in the ice-box, but he ends up with a beer in his hand, sitting on the porch and watching the lights wind towards him on a road through the desert. The rain is so heavy that he can barely make them out. They come and go like spectres.

It's a five, nearly six hour drive from San Francisco to Mojave when the going's good, and Chris just has time to go and get another beer, and _maybe, if you make it before midnight, you can still say that it's your birthday when you get out of your car in the pouring rain_. He stands on the porch, a beer in each hand, and looks down at James T. Kirk, the image of his father, standing there in the pouring rain of a desert storm.

"Are you coming inside?" he says, and, as he watches, Jim Kirk tips his head back and opens his mouth and just stands there with his arms hanging at his sides, and Chris doesn't even pretend to notice the way that his shirt sticks across his chest or the way his hands curl into fists and then relax again, each finger flexing and then going still. He remembers that first night in the bar; sitting across from Jim with his face beat half out of shape. He'd known how to handle him then because the same things that worked with Jim Kirk would have worked with Chris Pike.

Who dares wins, son. Sometimes, it feels like everything they do has an edge of dare to it.

If it ain't broke, his mother used to say...

He sets the beer down at the top of the steps and then he goes back to his chair, rocking it back and forth with one heel against the floor and waiting for Jim to stop being an ass and be ready to come in out of the rain.

He's soaked to the skin by the time he lopes up the steps, shivering in the chill of the evening air. Thirty years old tonight. The good don't always die young, but, as Chris watches Jim tip his head back and swallow half the beer down in one go, he thinks about how some deaths just take longer than others, and how some kids just aren't born to make old bones.

"You didn't call," he points out as Jim sinks down to sit on the deck next to him. Jim leans his head back against his knee, which aches sometimes in the cold and reminds him of being strapped down and wakes him sweating in the night, and, without thinking about it, Chris tousles his fingers through damp, curling hair. He worked out a while ago that Jim doesn't let himself relax around just anybody. The front, it's an act and, now that he's a Captain, it's a way of life. He doesn't hide behind his father's legend. He wears it like fucking armour, and, sometimes, they shove together so hard that it bruises.

The warm, slow, quiet times are rarer.

"It's my fucking birthday again," says Jim.  
"Yeah," says Chris, leaving his hand resting on the top of Jim's head as he lifts his beer and takes a long swallow. When Jim doesn't pull away he lets his hand slip down to rest against the side of Jim's neck. Some nights, they could sit like this for the whole night and then, sometime before dawn, Jim'll turn his head and kiss Chris' fingers and then he'll get back in his car and drive back to the dry dock in San Francisco, and Chris won't see him in the flesh for another year. He sends letters, his hand-writing awful. When he can't sleep, he places calls, bounced to Earth off distant stars. "You want me to break out the champagne?"

Jim huffs out a laugh and shakes his head, setting the bottle down on the boards between his knees.

"I'm really fucking tired," he says, quietly.  
"How long have you been on solid ground?" asks Chris like he doesn't know, like _Admiral Christopher Pike_ doesn't know when the Enterprise breaks atmosphere. Like she doesn’t take his heart with him when she goes, and that’s his loss to bear, and nobody else’s.  
"Twelve hours," says Jim, stretching one arm over his head and then draping it across both of Chris' thighs and leaving it there.  
"It takes six to drive here."  
"They can debrief me in the morning."

The rain has mostly stopped now and Chris can already feel the heat creeping back into the night, the desert taking the dark back for its own.

"Drink your beer," he says.

*

By now, Jim knows his way to the bedroom, and Chris lets him go on ahead, setting the bottles on the counter, locking the doors. He leaves the candle burning on the sill. They never last through the night but, somehow, it's a comfort to leave them burning.

It's easy to start doings things and fall into doing them forever.  
And that would really be okay. That would be just fine.

By the time he walks into his bedroom, Jim's face down in the middle of the bed, and he's managed to peel off his sodden t-shirt but he's still wearing his boots. 

"Take your boots off before you get in my bed, Captain," says Chris, but it's easier to sit down on the edge of the bed and unlace them himself, dropping them on the floor one after the other before he toes out of his own. He stands up and pushes out of his jeans, stays in his t-shirt and his underwear when he slips into his own bed and waits for Jim to get comfortable, squirming out of his pants, and he's naked when he presses himself up against Chris' side. He waits until Kirk's stopped fidgeting and then he wraps one arm around him. They fall easily into being near.

"Thirty," says Jim, his voice muffled, his face turned against Chris' chest. "Fucking _thirty_."  
"What're you trying to prove?" asks Chris, shifting his weight in the bed until joints stop complaining and he's as comfortable as Jim feels, a dead weight against him. "I was twenty years old when you were born, Jim."

Which makes him fifty years old as he's lying there with this beautiful boy, this star-chasing son of legends lying there beside him, living on borrowed time.

Which makes him lucky, probably. Or means that, eventually, the universe finds a way to pay you back for your bravery and your suffering.

What he does is turn his head and brush a kiss against Jim's forehead and feel the way he relaxes. They have a variation of this conversation every year. Sometimes there's sex, sometimes there isn't. Once, they fought the whole night and Chris ended up with a kitchen sink full of broken glass, standing between Jim's spread knees and dabbing at his bloody lip with a cotton swab. They ended up swaying together while the sun came up. Now, he shifts and Jim shifts, and it shouldn't be this easy when they spend so little time actually in the same room, but, somehow, it is.

His mother would have said that it was God who made it so that he walked into that bar just as George Kirk's son was getting his ass handed to him.

Chris prefers to think that Jim Kirk is just the sort of kid that the Universe moves around to accommodate.

It's not like Jim's the only one he ever does this with. There's a woman who's ten years older that Jim which makes her ten years _younger_ than the man that she chooses to share her bed with from time to time with, when she's passing through. She's got long brown legs and glass-green eyes and a name which means "ocean" in a language which Chris has never been able to get his tongue around. She kisses deep and sweet, like Jim does. 

They both kiss like they mean it. 

Sometimes, it's Chris who ends up on his back in the rumpled sheets, with Jim inside him and his hand smoothing against the scarred skin of Chris’ thigh. One of the first things that Chris noticed about George Kirk's kid were his hands, not beautiful hands, but broad and strong hands, hands to be trusted, even when they were bloodied and scuffed. Later, sitting at the kitchen table, Chris had separated Jim's fingers and kissed each knuckle in turn and looked up just in time to see him smile.

His mother had put desert flowers on that table, but Chris Pike never had time for gathering flowers. He was always grasping at other things, though no less transient.

Slick and waiting, Jim lies there with a tube of lube on his stomach and his knees spread wide, watches as Chris shucks his clothes and comes back to bed naked and ready. 

There are things that he finds himself wanting to tell Jim at times like these, when they're both still for a moment, and Jim's getting used to the feeling of having Chris inside him again. He wants to tell him that a Captain will never love anybody as much as he loves his ship _and that's okay_. He wants to tell him that women (and men, too) are a comfort, a solace, a hiding place, but home will always be the U.S.S Enterprise, and, as long as he remembers that, he'll have somewhere to go back to. He wants to tell him that falling isn't the end of the world as long as you know there's someone to catch you. He wants to tell him to follow his wandering, wondering, racing, dangerous heart. _Trust yourself, son. You'll be okay._

He tells him none of these things. Instead, he kisses him as he starts to move, slowly at first, with Jim's knees bent on either side of his hips. He sucks at the taste of the rain on Jim’s lips and imagines that, underneath it, he can taste the blue of atmosphere, the bitter-sweet of warp. Jim moans and arches and Chris curls his fingers around his cock and strokes him in time with the thrusts and, finally, he feels him let go. The rain starts falling again, falling hard against the sky-light over the bed and the moonlight sends strange patterns spinning across Jim's skin as he pulls Chris down for another kiss.

This ends the way it always does: he falls asleep with still sticky skin and the moonlight slanting across his face and, when he wakes up, Jim's already gone. Jim leaves his shirt behind and takes one of Chris' back to San Francisco with him, back to his crew and his ship, and one more year of borrowed time. 

Which is something that he learned from George Kirk, without ever meeting him.

In a few days, he’ll call.

Sometime in the night, the way it always does, the candle on the sill went out, so he breaks it gently from the saucer, flaking wax into the sink. It's done its purpose, served, for another year, as a bearing...a little light in a crowded sky. There's another horse grazing a little way off. She’s a sleek silver mare, which means that the woman named for an ocean will be here any time, combing through the silver in her hair with her fingers. Maybe he'll open the champagne today, or maybe just make fresh coffee, and maybe they’ll fuck or maybe they’ll just sit and talk for a while.

Life goes on.

One day, he knows that there'll be no point in lighting a candle for James T. Kirk. His borrowed time will have run clean out. Until then, he puts the candle in the drawer, saves it for another rainy year.

The last thing that Chris always means to tell Jim is this: borrowed time is the best, because the Universe has no plan for what you do with it. You can work miracles on borrowed time.

You are entirely your own.


End file.
